Cut Up Poems 4

*Text From "My Mother: A Demonology" by Kathy Acker, "THe Powerbook" by Jeanette WInterson, "Ecstasia" by Francesca Lia Block, a dream dictionary,

Cut-Up Poems 3

*Text from "Ironweed" by William Kennedy

Cut up Poems 2

*Text from:
"My Mother: A Demonology" by Kathy Acker, "Ecstasia" by Francesca Lia Block, "The Powerbook" by Jeanette Winterson, and "In the Cut" by Susanna Moore

I've been making cut-up poetry out of books I've read and am getting rid of/letting go of. I'm a little obsessed, I'll admit, taking the gorgeousness of other people words and rearranging them. It's creation out of the best sparks of inspiration-a good way to work around writers block.





*Text from "Ecstasia" by Francesca Lia Block, "Gut Symmetries"-Jeanette Winterson, "Sweet Taste of Lightning"-Sheri-D. Wilson, "Ironweed"- William Kennedy
-The words belong to them, the rearrangement of them are my work.

Today

I feel like there's this piece I'm missing, that I can't quite grasp onto that is at the centre of all of this healing stuff. Something floating through my subconscious, just out of reach that is some sort of key, something, something, but I don't know how or what or where. Just missing. Just absent. Voidy. And I just want somebody to help me figure it out, somebody to tell me what it is so I can just get over all of this and live my life.

I still feel like I'm reeling, like there are all these things around me, all these expectations, all these experiences I'm supposed to have and it's all spinning so fast and I don't know who to follow along with, who to listen to, what information to store, what to keep and what to let go of. There's just too much being thrown at me all the time, by so many people who mean well, by my own self who means well, and what part of what do I listen to. The part of me that is supposed to be able to be healthily discerning feels blocked, locked up, and I'm just big eyes nodding my head taking it all in a packaging it all up to be made sense of, somehow.

See, I don't know. ANd I know nobody really does, but I'm bored of watching everyone pretend like their navigating through this world with clear eyes and a clean compass glass, especially when their talking about how they're not pretending but they really still are, they just can't see it. I just can't see it. Everyone confuses me. I can't tell who's lying and who's real.

I don't know how to be around people but not be them as I'm around them. They tire me out. It is not a matter of taking steps, of desensitizing, of just being around people until they stop stepping into my skin. There are too many people around. There aren't meant to be so many people around all of the time.

I never feel like I'm in flow when I'm out in the world, I get sucked into everyone else's ideas of what life is, and time becomes all boxed up and contained, and there is no space to maneuver. Things crash into one another and it's all desperation, running around, pretending to be important, desperation trying to make itself into something that isn't desperation.

I still don't know how to be in the world, a part of it, without giving myself away at every moment, without losing all sense of who I am. When I'm around people, when i even dip my feet into the world as it exists right now, the structures that are in place, the way life is supposed to be played out, it's like I am completely sucked in, my skin disappears, my separation disappears and I am in an unknown, undesirable world.

My goal is not to be able to once again be of/in this world that has done nothing but beat me up and push me around. I do not want to be a part of society at large, of the world at large-it has nothing to offer me, and all I can offer it is a hollow shell of what once may have been a person. It will happily destroy me, as it will happily hurt anyone who is not able to easily give up idiosyncrasies and themselves.

My goal is to be a part of a different world, a different society completely. One that probably has yet to be created. To seek out, somehow, though I don't know how, people who are closer to where I am, who aren't stuck in the material morass of nothingness but can see beyond it. And do, and don't stay where they are out of fear.

I don't know what I want. I don't know what I can realistically expect-I don't even know if logic and reality exist, so why should I contain myself by them. I look outside my window and the only things i like are the trees and the mountains and the sky. Books and movies are better than so much of life, because at least they are attempting to create something of meaning, and allow the artisst and the reader/watcher to be transformed beyond the everyday.

I long for transformation that is green and lush and wildly flowing. I do not know what it is that I am becoming, but it is something other than what I was supposed to have been, in this bitter outside world. I don't even exist to the world at this point in time, because I make no sense to it.

April-September Book List

I'll probably begin to write, soonish. But I'm floating through photo self portrait land at the moment, and it's strange and slippery and I'm not ready to bring words into the balance. So I'll just write what I've been reading....* are very enjoyable and worth reading, double ** are one I found particularly stunning...

*"A Home at the End of the World"-Michael Cunningham
"Changing Heaven"-Jane Urqhuart
**"Girls, Visions, and Everything"-Sarah Schulman
*"Slow River"-Nicola Griffiths
"Runaway American Dream"-Jimmy Gutterman
"The Camino"-Shirley McLaine
**"Divisadero"-Michael Ondaatje
**"Lust and Other Stories"-Susan Minot
"The Ihop Papers"-Alie Liebegott
*"Autobiography of Red"-Anne Carson
*"Veronica"-Mary Gaitskill
*"Rat Bohemia"-Sarah Schulman
"Valencia"-Michelle Tea (re-read)
**"The Host"-Stephenie Meyer
*"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"-JK Rowling
"City of Bones"-Cassandra Clare (I preferred the second book in the series)
*"City of Ashes"-Cassandra Clare ( but you have to read the first book first)
"A Northern Light"-Jennifer Donnelly
"Keeping you a Secret"- Julie Anne Peters
"Gossip Girl"-Cecily von Ziegesar
*"Uglies", "Pretties", and "Specials"-Scott Westerfeld (standalone ok, as a trilogy very good)
*"Marked"-P.C. Cast (interesting goddess based teenage vampire series-better than it sounds)
"Betrayed"-P.C. Cast

I'm starting to read "Lucky" by Alice Sebold, and "Rapture" by Susan Minot next.

week

The house here is full now. Four of us, another week of chaos, which I can handle. It's the steadiness that I'm not prepared for.

One more week with the three of us with the A names, then miss F settles into her new room, again ( the end of the summer of musical bedrooms), and subletee miss A moves into the living room until she finds a new place.

This weekend is the Grand Cleanup of the house. Which is this big scary grey cloud over there. I haven't even unpacked my clothes from when I moved back in at the beginning of August. Living out of laundry baskets for nearly a month. Kind of feels like travelling.

And here I am, in my last free week, feeling it filling up, so little space left, so much to do. Counselling appointmet, IKEA visit, first gym visit.

And really, booking that first gym visit wasn't pleasant. Everyone I spoke to on the phone was very brusque. I don't like brusqueness, I want people to be nice to me, to be helpful, especially when I'm nervous. It's my first visit, I obviously don't know what I'm doing, I just want some information and an encouraging voice on the other end of the phone line. being treated coldly does not make me want to go to their gym and have to potentially deal with someone else who will treat me coldly in person for the entire duration of my gym orientation. This is why I've avoided aking for help at local rec centre gyms, and why I've avoided getting gym memberships in the past. The few times I've called and requested information, or gone in to talk to someone , it's always been a bad experience.

Now, I realize that I am more sensitive than other people to things like tone of voice and body language, but I've been in many social situations where I have felt welcomed and encouraged, so it's frustrating when I put myself out there and end up discouraged. Especially when other people seem to have positive experiences in places and situations that I have negative ones.

I think that I just have much higher interpersonal standards than most people. I tend to work quite hard at ensuring that other people are comfortable, and feel well taken care of, and welcomed. I care, significantly, even if the interaction is a small, supposedly meaningless one, I want the other person to experience the interaction as a significant occurrence/experience.

Which is what made me such a terrible retail/customer serivce worker. I've always known and recognized the bullshit relatioship of that whole interaction, and that the only important thing occurring is actually simple human connection. I hate selling people things they don't need, and don't really want. And so, I don't work in retail anymore. And it's why I'm going back to school.

But for right now, I'm going to sit in quiet, having finished my cup of peppermint tea, and then put on some sunscreen and go for a walk, do some errands. Pick up some twig tea, maybe, some nice shampoo from an organic store. Put on some lip balm and enjoy the sunny afternoon.

Three things, sort of.

I’ve been thinking about the purpose of this blog-expression, to be heard, thoughts, a necessary occupation in a difficult time.

A ll times are difficult. I am no more deficient of capability or communication than anybody else. I just function in, and experience the world in a very particluar way. More intensely, and with more sensitivity and awareness.

I have called myself many things: broken, delicate, forgotten, strange, odd, unfortunate, sensitive, fragmented, difficult, intense, incapable, weak, lonely, defective.

The words that I have not used, but should: sensitive, compassionate, kind, quirky, passionate, spontaneous, silly, intense, delicate, strong, bold, quiet, elemental.

If I keep living and writing from the first place, a place that I’ve needed to be, to spend time in, then I will become stuck there, I need to shift my perception, slightly.

I know how to place myself in a space of weakness, I understand what it means to be delicate and broken, I know what it feels like to be barely holding onto tiny fragments of myself and notice how quickly they seem to unravel.

And now I know that other people have seen this, have recognized this in me, not as a deficiency, but as a life lived.

So, this is a revamping of sorts, a twist of a mission statement, an offering of a less bloodied sort. I’ll love my grief, and respect my love. Not magically perfect, but perfectly natural.

Three things triggered this blatantly, but it’s been a work in progress for awhile:

1) A mix cd project that Adriana and I undertook, in which we each made a cd full of songs that could have been written about the other person.

2) Listening to Terami Hirsch, especially “Little Light”, “Waking the Dream”, “When It’s Dark”, and “Timberline” from her album Entropy 29.

3) Reading a chapter of Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart each night before I go to sleep.

I’ll be intricate, and ramble about each out of order, and probably entwined with each, but in another post.

Music has become a force in my life lately, stronger than it’s ever been. Always part of my life, always part of my identity, but lately, even more bone deep, life deep. Nourishing me, singing me to sleep and waking. Unearthing, digging up from the long buried ground images, symbols, articulated aspects that have been ignored and lost, now refound. Emotional archaeology, of the intentional, and rainwashed flooding accidental sort.

Recessional

Silver is still my favorite crayon
Treeful of Starling is still my favorite album ( today)
Alfed Stieglitz's portraits of Georgia O'Keefe and her hands are still some of my favorite photographs. ( I have three of them, postcard form, on the wall in front of my desk)
Weeping Willows are still my favorite trees (if I have to pick a favorite)

I talked to people today. Well, spoke to one on the telephone, long distance, all the way to the island, phone lines flickering and sparking words that will be passed through them in following months. Wrote to another, received a reply.

I'm sitting at the computer, listening to "You and the Candles", turning the silver crayon in my hands ( from Frances' box of 96 that I've claimed and now decorate my desk haphazardly), and periodically watching the leaves blown about by the wind outside the window. I'm lucky, I can see more trees that houses from this angle, and no road at all, if the curtain is placed well.

I found out that a friend of mine is having a gallery showing of a few of her paintings soon, and I'm actually in a couple of them. I've never been "officially" in a gallery before.

I spoke to another friend on the phone. She is blue today. I am too. Nothing new for me.

Productivity is low
sentences dense and unassuming
I covered myself with leaves but the wind still found me
glue unstuck and hinges pulled clear from their placements

tactile wishers
vicious listeners
tacking sticky tape behind our ears
to make the worst sounds cling
when we swallow our words unhindered
and spit up the balance our inner ears would supply

my bones are dry
the shape of a jaw with history imprinted
loosens its teeth to lose a story
and I leave my own fingernail marks on my skin
to remind myself that I'm here

a depth of breath
an impossibility of conveyance
put my right palm flat against my chest
to test for life
collapsible and longing for a clear exhalation
an exhortation of happiness forgiven

my passage long paid off
recessions envisioned and grown malleable, too slight
distance me from nerve to sensation
draw away and maybe I'll search for my features
in unknown rivers split by leaning stones

all ground has lost my traces
withdraw to begin again
heels first this time.

I really should spellcheck these entries before I post them.

yeah. I really should. But, I probably won't. I'll forget, or something.

A Wednesday Morning Mix tape ( with words)

First song of the day, Charlotte Martin’s “Days of the Week”. Non-invasive, non-abrupt switch from silence to sound, but not innocuous. Simplicity, not too much instrumentation, no really high pitched sounds first thing in the morning. Vienna Teng is usually a perfect for choice for first thing in the morning, last thing at night.

It’s as though I actually need to listen to something that doesn’t jolt my nervous system.

So second song of today, Vienna Teng’s “Blue Caravan”.I never thought I’d like Vienna teng’s music, much less be in absolute awe of her piano playing and find her voice to be of the least agitating tonal quality of almost every artist I listen to. Which doesn’t sound good, but I get headaches from listen to certain people sing. It doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate their work, it just means that I have trouble listening to thing for fun. For example, Rufus Wainwright always gives me a headache, and now, my brain has learned to recognize the musical intros to some of his songs, and gets a headache before he even starts singing. I still think he’s an amazing artist, making challenging and interesting work, I just can’t listen to it. But if there is one artist who is the least likely to give me a headache, it is Vienna Teng, which is actually why it took me awhile to appreciate her music. On the surface it sounds too poppy and simple. As I spoke of, though, in a previous entry, in her most staggering songs she has this deep sense of space and warmth in her playing and singing. Part of it is the warmth of the production, but most of it is that it just feels so organic and unforced, a whole, with her playing and her voice flowing together.

Which is why songs 3,4,5,6, 7 and 8 are Vienna Teng’s “Fields of Gold ( cover song)”, “Eric’s Song”, “Momentum”,”Gravity”, “Soon Love Soon”, and “Recessional”. “Recessional” still being one of my life altering songs. It’s because she sings these quiet and heartdropping lyrics, then gives you these following moments to relflect and let it sink in, before going on to the next perfect line. Not many songwriters can capture absence and sadness in such a strangely light yet profound way.

Then, at #9 comes Tori Amos’s “Bells for Her”. This song is almost a funeral to me. When I hear it I have to stop what I’m doing and just listen, it’s a funeral, the nearly numb, pretty much tranced out state of grievig, rather than the sharp and shaking tears part. In this case, though, it’s a quiet, and this song is quiet, with the piano filtered through soemthing called a Leslie cabinet, and mixed very low, almost whispering vocals. Searching through the ether for a heart gone missing, for a soul gone missing. Memorializing it’s existence. Like “Recessional”, very close thematically, actually, absence and loss. I’ve never listened to the two of them side by side before.

#10 is Tori Amos’ “Baker Baker”. I don’t think that I can underestimate the power of Tori Amos’s music in my life. It’s something that I never abandon for long, that I keep coming back to all the time. My first love will always be her third album, “Boys for Pele”, and it’s taken me quite a long time to truly pay attention to her second album “ Under the Pink”, but when my nerves are frayed and everything is overwhelming and I need to retreat into some safe place, it’s with the quieter songs off of “Under”, and it’s b-sides, one of which, “Black Swan”, is my #11 song for today. Very few people can manage both quirky and deep loss in the same song. “Sister Janet” is my #12 song, a song which always reminds me of Roseanna when I listen to it, because I heard it for the first time on her walkman, at school. To me, this song is the perfect example of the tying together of the otherworldly and archetypical and the concrete everyday that is Tori’s trademark. And that’s one of my primary difficulties, concerns, things that I’m preoccupied with: living in two worlds at once-the inner and the outer world. The world of the self, the inside the head world, and the external world of relationships and society. My inside has never coherently blended with the outside.

(song #13 is “Just Like Heaven”[cover of The Cure] by Charlotte Martin, which I adore because you can hear the low roudned sound of the piano pedals, and because I always just wanted to hear this song on piano, and she does a great version)

Song #14. “Blindness” by Hawksley Workman. Song #15 is the same. And an abandonment of writing in favor of staring off into the void, seeing and not seeing. Moments of the inside overwhelming the outside.Sometimes, I have absolutely no sense of how it’s even possible to exist in the external world (Song #16. “No beginning and No End”, Hawksley Workman), my inner life is that much different from what I see. I don’t mean that I’m living two lives simultaneously, that I have this whole parallel yet skewed imagination life, because I don’t. It’s more about image and depth and perception (Song #17-song 16 repeated). It’s as though everything coming at me from outside is bright and sharp and clear and jagged, while everything inside is gentle, and hazy, like a surrral yet lovely fairytale floating through the smoke at the coziest fireside ever. Inside of my mind feels curved and flowing, organic, deep, and symbolic. And often, it feels like the outside is constantly trying to maim and mutilate, painfully kill the sense of peace and wonder that is inherently a part of me.

(Song #18 “Oh, You Delicate Heart” by Hawksley Workman-it seemed appropriate). So must of the world’s energy is this aggressive, driving forward, thrust energy, and I am just so not that, and I experience that speed and force as a painful blow, as a constant attack. (Song #19 “Bones” by Charlotte Martin”). (Song #20, replay of the last). (Song #21, “Bones” again). One of the theories behind anxiety and sensitivity, put forward by Elaine Aron, is that a certain percentage of the human population actually has highly sensitive nervous systems, more so than the average percent. Hence the sense of being bombarded and overwhelmed by a world that most peole can shrug off and walk through.

(Song #22 “Clam, Crab,Cockle, Cowrie” by Joanna Newsom).However, I suppose that the concept that most people exist happily and easily in this world isn’t very true in any sense. The high quick development and high speed of industry and technology, while solving some problems has created such a huge amount of self inflicted/inflicting problems that most people do not live thriving, healthy, beautiful lives. (Song #23 Jennifer Terran-“The Painter”) We spend our time working jobs that mean nothing to us, just to house and feed ourselves, eating food that is processed poison, living vicarious and deadened lives through tv and movies. So few of us manage to break out of, or even have the possibility of breaking out of this treacherous way of living.

I’m just so sick of being considered sick and unmanageable, of being the problematic and unrealistic quantity, while it is actually the world itself, our society itself that is ill and completely damaged and cruel. (Song #24, Patrick Wolf “Teignmouth”). It makes complete sense to withdraw away from a world full of atrocities and biternesses, cruelty and constant pain and competition. Who would choose to stand in the middle of that? I guess some people are able to avoid seeing the world as a whole, don’t understand how intrinsically everything is connected, how close we are to each other, though separated by such seemingly strong walls. Withdrawl, whether it be anxiety, agoraphobia, depression, is one of the few responses that makes complete sense to me.

(Song #25 “Little Light”-Terami Hirsch). Yet. All of those things are considered disorders, are in need of being cured, are wrong, are a disease of the person, not a reaction to a dying world that pretends it is the pinnacle of thriving success. Evolution oe snot move as quickly as industry, so no wonder our biology is going haywire. (Song #26 “A Broke Machine”-Terami Hirsch{not intentional trying in with what I’m talking about, but subconsciously obviously. A broke machine indeed.}). So, one of my struggles, actually probably THE struggle of the last eight months or so, has been with coming to a place of understanding and acceptance that I am not in fact broken, no matter how much I refer to myself as such. Broken resonates with me, I feel broken in the face of the world, I feel that I have crumbled under the weight, under the strain, that yes, every pain of the world has made it’s way through my heart, through my mind, through my body. (Song #27-“A Broke Machine” again). And it has broken me, standing delicate and brave in the face of sharpness and cruelty has caused me to shatter. I held it together, cracks in the glass and all, for years, until I shattered, and I’m still shattering. There is so much more fragmentation that is happening, that needs to happening. But I’m managing to piece things back together, at the same time, now. Regluing, into another structure, another formation of self.

(Song # 28-“Timberline”-Terami Hirsch). “ I tiptoe softly to the edge of the timberline, where a part of me is waiting on the other side. Have I lost her? I feel a rushing from the underground, where part of me is blooming, where my silence is a sound”-Terami Hirsch

(Song #29 “Memory Picture”-Terami Hirsch) According to my Last.fm chart, I’ve listened to Terami Hirsch 800 times in the last two months. I’ve never been that dedicated to one artist before, in such a short period of time.

(Song #30 “When It’s Dark”-Terami Hirsch).”but I am still tender in the spring, with new grass pressed beneath me, with the darkness singing me to sleep as the stars are weeping”-Terami Hirsch

(Song #31 “A Hundred Flowers-Terami Hirsch).She’s just lyrically amazing. Comfortable, yet constantly surprising. I just get so caught up when I listen to her songs, especially on “Entropy 29” and “A Broke Machine”. “All Girl Band”, “Stickfigures” and “To the Bone” were beautiful and deep and personal, but her two most recent albums hit those imagistic and archetypical places that are so much stronger than emotional revelation on its own. It’s that Tori place. A very different place, but Terami’s got her own world, and is truly beginning to be able to express it potently.

“It's been a long timeSince we've seen beautyLet a hundred flowers bloomAfter a hundred days of rain(From the head through the mouth to the ground in the root to the heart in the vein, in the vein, in the vein)”-Terami Hirsch

It’s fitting that I began at Charlotte Martin, and ended up at Terami Hirsch, by way, mostly, of Tori Amos, Vienna Teng, and Hawksley Workman. I discovered Charlotte Martin about two months ago, around the same time that I rediscovered Terami Hirsch.

Muscial time line time ( purely for my own interest):

Bought “Boys for Pele” by Tori Amos when I was 13. Didn’t really listen to it until I was 15. Then bought “From the choirgirl Hotel”, and saw her in concert for the first time. I think I’ve been to four more. Best was probably the one here and in Seattle, for the “Scarlet’s Walk” tour. Have since acquired and passionately listened to all of her albums and b-sides over the last ten years, except her most recent one, which I haven’t been able to get into at all.

Found Terami Hirsch’s “All Girl Band” when I was 17, and listened to it non-stop. I happily received her “Stained ep” and “Stickfigures” cd in the mail for free, and the three songs on “Stained”(later on “To the Bone”) were pretty much the only thing I listened to for about a month in my first year of university. Then I ordered “To the Bone” when it came out (I loved receiving cd’s in the mail, it was such an exciting thing, nobody else I knew did that), and listened and loved it. But then her music sort of fell away from my life for about five years. She released a new album this year “A Broke Machine”, I kind of stumbled upon it, and it was so extraordinary, so different from yet similar to her older, work, that I instantly became fascinated, and just dove into all of her music again, discovering “Entropy 29”. If I ever get a worded tattoo, it just might be “From the head through the mouth to the ground in the root to the heart in the vein” from “A Hundred Flowers”.

I bought Hawksley Workman’s “Last Night We Were the Delicious Wolves” for $3.99 at a used cd store about four or five years ago, purely based upon the fact that he had produced Sarah Slean’s “Night Bugs” album, and I loved each and every thing about that album. I listened to it once, and didn’t like it, and didn’t play it again for a long, long time. Last summer, seemingly all of a sudden, almost everyone I knew adored Hawksley Workman. So, I felt out of the loop, and found a copy of “Treeful of Starling” at the library. I was right at the cusp of my total emotional breakdown. I was creating theatre, somewhat in a way I wanted, with project after project. I was relearning how to sing , I was playing the piano and singing in public, which had been my dream for as long as I can remember. And I was so unhappy, and alone. I listened to “Treeful” nonstop, everyday, in rotation with Joanna Newsom’s “Ys” and Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible”. Every night on my walk home from the bus stop, after rehearsal, or a show, I would lay down in the grass outside my parents complex, and listen to “When these Mountains were the Seashore”, desperately hoping for soemthing in my life to break or change, because I just couldn’t handle it anymore. From there, I spent the next few months discovering his other albums, fell head over hells with all of them ( excepting “Lover/Fighter”, which I find kind of hollow and badly produced ,although “Autumn’s Here” is one of my favorite songs), and have been so ever since. Especially after the concert at St. Andrews-Wellesley sometime in May. Completely extraodinary, I can’t even begin to explain it. Ask Adriana, she’s better at explaining these kinds of things.

Charlotte Martin is one of those names that always comes up in conjunction with “ if you like Tori Amos, you’ll love…”, and I always dismissed her. I guess it’s a case, much like Hawksley Workman, where it’s all about finding the right song at the right time. In May I was sort of obsessively buying as much piano based singer-songwriter music that I could possibly find on CD BABY, amongst which was Jennifer Terran ( another artist whose work I’d found uninteresting on many other occasions), whose “Full Moon in Three” is another one of my life altering albums, and Charlotte Martin’s name just kept popping up everywhere. I loved the picture on the cover of her “Veins” ep, so I listened to the title track, and the second, “Bones”, and I was gone. Veins and bones, of course I loved it. Since then, I’ve managed to acquire almost all of her work, some of which I like much better than others ( I rarely listen to “Test-Drive Songs”, for example), and listen to her almost as much as Terami Hirsch-and on an interestign note, the two of the are actually friends.

Vienna Teng. Much of the same story as Charlotte Martin, except I’d had her most recent album, “Dreaming through the Noise” for about a year, and had never been able to listen to it, it was too sleepy, too slow for me. When I opened my Last.fm account, Vienna was one of those artists who kept showing up on every radio station I listened to, and it was about the tenth time I heard “gravity” that it suddenly clicked, and I was truly floored. As I mentioned earlier, it’s about warmth and space. She has such an intimate and inviting way of playing and singing. However, the reason I don’t listen to her quite as much, is that for every song of hers that I’m astounded by, there are a couple that I don’t really like. I’m sure that one day I will, but “Recessional” and “Momentum” on their own are worth hundreds of songs.

Fluctuations and depth, perception

I’m home, living from laundry baskets, only half unpacked. I feel years older than when I left.

I’m kind of blog cheating with this entry, because it’s actually part of an e-mail conversation I had earlier today with Adriana. My ever attempts at untangling concept and actualities of friendships and other relationships….

It's hard to know how much weight to put on a friendship without scaring the other person off. Our primary relationships, our romantic relationships, are som consuming and important, that not having one, I tend to shift much of the emotional and intellectual weight onto my friends, and have very little concept of what is appropriate, and what is too much. I struggle with friendship, because I feel as though I'm supposed to be ashamed at having intense emotional relationships with people other than my romantic partner.

I always feel as though, being the single one, I am invading other people's lives, taking over, demanding too much from the wrong sources. As though the only thing allowed to fill the relationship void, the community void, the emotional support void, is a romantic partner. Which I'm not actively seeking, because it's so hard to even let my friends get close to me, so how can I stand to have somebody see me, and be with me on such a potent state of vulnerability if I can't even let myself be there.

I've tended towards backing off, drawing away, removing any deep emotional attachment. I've never really had friends, Skirting around the circumferences of other's lives. Hollow heart, hollow eyes, hollow words, and wringing hands.

It's just so hard for me to feel, to see, that I have anything to offer to another person, so I am overwhelmed. Hard for me to accept that I am capable of connecting with another person. To accept that I even exist in a world that isn't empty, that isn't barren and flat grey, devoid grey, windy tear-swept burdened closed off grey.

I don't know. That's all I have to offer.

ok, I'll admit it. Sometimes, I use a thesaurus.

I wrote a song a couple of days ago. Or a simple poem, if not quite a song. But writing to chord changes and glimpses of melodies causes me to write significantly differently than writing with just the sound of words. Simpler, and the sounds and rhythm just flow a little bit more.
This is one of my simple songs, the time limit, very little editing or second guessing.

Eb-Bb-Ab

Pretty soon she'll be a dove
and the records will play again
in the morning all those thoughts in the night
just flutter and lighten
thin ice and vapour coalesce
into a cup of tea
eyes readjust to the green and lush
all her brittle shiftings decay

in her bed she had nothing but sleep
limbs softly twisting only in dreams
Rothko, Chagall, Picasso on her walls
faces all turned and blending

Ab-Bb-Eb-Cm

her portait heightens her bones in yellow
the shirt she wore in it, was it her own
her features fumbled loosely in charcoal
hang in a third floor apartment in Montreal

Eb-Bb-Ab

she practices her handwriting
on words so full
they cause her hands to shake
and the ink to streak
illegible blue lines curving
and staining her wrists
where once finely washed edges
loosened their tips gently

Ab-B-Eb-Cm

and blood flows out faster than you think it might
she stops it with three fingers pushed against a pulse
the breadth of her heart she can't keep inside

Eb-Bb-Ab

all of her skin grown smooth again now
her repairs are subtle and strong
she can hold water in her palms
and let it drip through
her offerings so simple
but she has this day
and a bowl of soaking rose petals
is her method of keeping the darkness aside

Not a word to find

I’ve written the fragments out until they’ve become no more whole than before.

I’m feeling lost and uncertain. I need time and space, but then I don’t know what to do with it when I have it.

Stagnation is closing in, and the walls are too thick for me to scrape a hole through with my fingernails and crawl out into the open.

I used to write poems about bloody rooms, girls scratching at their walls until their fingernails bleed, leaving streaks and imprints, dripping, red and caked caked brown. My image life full of blood, but not true violence. Not a lashing out, an intentional hurting and cruelty, but visceral and veins. Lips bitten torn and other unintentionally self inflicted wounds.

I’m writing about two kinds of miscarriages in “Evelyn and May” : one intentional, and ( one unintentional. Of blood pooling out from wombs, and flowing along inner thighs. Love and loss encapsulated in a function of the body. May induces her loss because she knows she cannot have what it is she wants, and Evelyn chooses one loss and has another occur (sympathy miscarriage?).

I am unhappy with their story, I don’t know where it’s going, I don’t know if I like what I’m writing, and I haven’t touched the play since I was in the Magdalen islands. Somethings’s hitting too close to the bone. A vicarious autobiography that is factually untrue, but emotionally and subconsciously true?

I don’t know how all of the pieces fit together. I don’t know what I’m really trying to reveal, and I feel as though I’m at a point of tipping over into revelation that will either f push this play forward, or kill it completely.
T
I am not a writer. Most times I’m not even a person, or a woman, or a thing, or a creature. I fall into times of non-existence. I’m self absorbed and unsatisfied. I’m lonely and uninvolved and bitter. I don’t love anyone and will not let them love me. I’m desperate, and hate my desperation.

But I don’t feel sorry for myself. I never have. It’s just that I don’t understand. I really, really don’t understand, and it feels like everyone else does.

I don’t feel like myself, outside.
Exteriority and terror conflated.

I compromise myself in everything that I do.

I don’t want to be any part of this world.

I’m confused and unhappy and sick.

I can’t create beautiful things because destructions abilities have so much more force behind them. Beauty is alone and torn at all of the important seams. My stitch ripper is effective, but my finely threaded needle shakes in my hands, and my stitches are not strong enough to stay planted where I sew them.

My offerings will never be enough, and my blessings are burdened.

Why is everything so sad? I don’t know how to experience the world without a double glazed filter of grief. Does it ever change? Will I ever smile truly, proud of the moment I find myself in? Shoulders back and delighted, laughter flowing past my heart?

I don’t know how to feel all of this. I don’t know why I’m expected to, why I have, why the struggle is full of so much struggle. Why life is such a fight, when I’m not meant to be a fighter.

I don’t know how to stop editing myself. My tongue is numb and I can’t say anything that reverberates beyond my hollow mouth. I am not an appropriate being. My sanity, my freedom. Whose life am I living?

How much grieving can be done in saying goodbye to the girl and young woman that I never was, and never will be able to be?

Why am I alone in the face of so much darkness and despair? I have no touch of reassurance. I’m troubled and unconsoled.
Why do I even try for words? Why do I even try to reach out, forcing my inky blueprint into the organized and delicate lives of others who have no need of inkstained fingers and lips. My hands are not enough to hold anything. My backbone is fine cartilage, flexible and unstable. My heart flutters wildly, as strange and untranslatable as the speech I’ve never learned to speak. I can’t even walk properly, my feet won’t touch the ground, I can’t feel myself on the ground, just skimming, slipping over. A drift with no commitment.
What am I even looking for?

...

Yes. I am listening to Terami Hirsch's "Memory Picture" and crying into my cup of tea at 1:50 in the morning. Alone in my apartment.I only wanted a cup of tea, but all the boxes of chamomile and sleepytime and mint were empty, so I'm drinking decaf green tea peach, which I don't even like, but I needed to hold my favorite red mug full of warm herbal tea.My hair falls over my face as I lean over, curtaining the cup as my my nose nearly drips, and my eyes almost do too. This is who I am. i guess. This is me at my most basic. Bone achingly sad, in that almost indefinable grieving melancholy sort of way, with a clarity of life threaded through. I am not exciting. I am not energetic. i am delicate and broken and unknowing. beauty overwhelms me. The apartment is so quiet.

I feel disappeared. I feel as thin paper walls. Pages strewn with words, rubbed until the paper is clear, but all unread.

"But was this the face you loved?
Were these her hands?
Oh, I hardly recognize myself
I wanted this moment in my hand
I wanted to touch you
To feel you breathe
I wanted to hold you
So you wouldn't fall alone"
-Terami Hirsch, "Memory Picture"

Thoughts at a party

I went to a party
and I was alone

parties make me cry
and nobody likes the girl who cries at parties

I'm not very good at karaoke
and I have emotional breakdowns when I can't do something perfectly

I lay on the trampoline all by myself
and looked up at the sky and the edges of the willow tree

I could hear everyone singing inside
and did not know who I was for a minute

The compost has brought in fruit flies
which hovered around the food, half drowning themselves in salad dressing

my home became not my home, my living room overtaken by strangers
who don't notice when i leave for an hour to read my book in the park

I only three sentences, all of which I had read before
since I was too busy thinking of my social ineptitude

the sky is difficult to live up to
and I feel as though I have to clear my blood

regenerate my entire body
each time I am surrounded by so many loud people I do not know

why am I so delicate
why are my limits so close to the bone compared to others

The city frightens me
there are so many people I'll never exist for

I lose myself in everyone else's mothertongue
my own being so untranslatable

I am told to make my own family
orphan in this world that I am

but my nerves stop at the tips of my fingers
and will not reach any further

out of myself
even out of this skin I am still inside sinews and muscles

bones structured to be upright
joins inflexible, unoffering

there is no perfection in what I am
and my imperfections are not beautiful

they are torn seams and ripped moments
askew and faltering along impeccably badly

I have been through so many deaths
and these ashes have so few sparks left

in these night all the birds have gone to sleep
in their unreachable nests, tending to tender eggs

all my skin is bruised
and no one bothers to bring me a new compress to reduce the swelling

no one sits by my side as I slip away feverishly
or sweat in broken dreams and splintered memories

sewing oneself back together is a solitary business
and the salt of the sea is always staining the hem of my skirt

my fingers are needled pricked with no callouses made
each stab is a new drop of my heart dripping into careless air

too much of my own caked blood on my wedding dress
I will never wear it by his side

All of the fabric piled around me
he will not sift through to find the simple gauze of my voice

my heart chambered and hollowed
spaces he doesn't want to fill

why was I chosen to be broken?

Two words.

Tactile. Fragily. Fragily Tactile. Tactile and fragile. The tactility of fragility. I'm obsessed with palms and hands when I write. Holding, cradling, touching. The hands being the most obvious and seemingly first point of so many physical contacts. Which isn't true, of course, which is why seeming. Our feet, our mouths, all portions of our skin are constantly coming into contact with so many things. I am fascinated by the tactile, and I am fascinated by the fragile. So many people seem overcome with breaking the fragile, but I want to let it be and feel it bloom wise and bold. What is bold and fragile?

(Zoe Keating's "Sun Will Set" is, at this moment, the aural equivalent of these two words. Tactile and fragile.).

When put together, there is such a gentle strength to these words. My hands are alight with fragility. I am burdened and blessed with a lack of touch. It makes me sad.

Older photos

Time. Art.

I find the ticking of clocks comforting. It means I'm still alive and following each second.Each moment of time is happening, and I'm there in it.

I am a vulnerability.

I do not value art over experience. Over existence. Art is a profound part of existence, but it is a part that arises from life. Art is life, but life is not just art.

I do not create to prove my existence, to situate it. My being is already proven, in steps and standstills, gestures, voices, and heartbeats. I create to live my life more fully. To sink deeply into and delineate my experiences. The experiential is where the passion and power lie. The heart and bones and blood and mind. The senses reaching out and drawing in, synapses snapping and pumping invitations of knowledge through and to the mind. Rational captures imagination, twists into something vibrant and strange.

I go back to pencil and paper, a sound of sliding rather than the clacking or clatter of keys. My hands forming the words themselves, appearing, to fill space and leave the mysterious of fervor and forever in imperfect spaces.

The craft, art, does not come before the heart. It is a manifestation of it, a tool, a medium of communication, of exultation and woe. A space to be safe in an otherworld home when this world is too bitter and vicious. A vessel to be held in, or to hold in palms up and cupped in offering to yourself, to your lover, your loved ones, to the word. Water pooling to be poured.

It is not good enough now to fit a form, to place yourself into the hands of established meaning and structure. Our bodies are not aligned in the same ways, and our thoughts, given space, are so much more than we have let them be. We don't need to deliver anything. We don't need to finish anything.

I have not but my hands, my feet, my body, my lungs, my voice, my mind, my breath, my tongu an unending list. I will not shift my forminto a preconceived (such a shell of a word, a cage, predetermined, too) immutable shape. I will work without the constraining luxury of empty rules.

In Diane Ackerman's Book " A natural history of the senses", she speaks of a composer ( Villa Lobos, I think, could be wrong), who would sketch the outlinrd of a mountain range, from a different vantage point each day. He would take this drawing of ups and downs, lines cy=urving and sharp, rising to blend, and sit at the piano, composing along with, against this image, music structured, following, this image. These lines.

I wish to live so organically, and create by what we live, what we see, and what we make of it. Not to have to tell a story by structure, upholding past visions of philosophy and struggle. It is not a brutal abandonment of form, but a restructuring through out deeply subjective selves.

"Soft gentle rebel, let the sun pierce the moments of spring"-Hawksley Workman.

I fight too hard, we fight forward too quickly and strongly, and misinterpret what it means to live our own worlds, to live outside the violent damands of this harsh and hardening society. Gentleness is not weakness, the sharp edges can be cooled and made smooth by rustling leaves. My body can heal if I let it breathe, and my emotions can thrive if I don't press too hard at them.

Trauma needs to be held gently and lovingly in our hands ( and we are all traumatized in this world). A kind touch that skin can settle into with a blessing.

ow. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Too much heartburn to write. As a 26th birthday gift, I would love to not have an ulcer. That would be lovely. The whole stomach is destroying itself from the inside thing is not so much fun. It's distracting. I can think of prettier things to suffer from. Ennui. Nobody says "Oh, I just suffer from the ennui" anymore ( so much classier if you add "the" in front of it). Although, i suppose that ennui is just inherently boring, given what it is, so maybe it's not prettier. Though, other than perhaps an attending sallowness, someone suffering from ennui would look prettier than someone suffering from an ulcer. Less of the whole doubled over in pain, shallow breathing aspects. Anyways. No writing due to pain.

Songs

I get stuck on certain songs. Sometimes, I can’t even listen to an artist’s whole album because I’m so absolutely in love with just one song. Today was a music day. I probably listened to about six hours of music. When I can't do anything else, I can still listen to music. It keeps me whole. Brings me back to earth, back to myself when I'm fearful and panicking.These are the songs that have enraptured and captured me today ( and mostly for the last few days.:

“Memory Picture”-Terami Hirsch

“I cut six inches off my hair so I won’t feel pretty, and I walk in public where I won’t drown. Make it stop”…she’s so lyrically simple yet defined in this song, accompanied by chord progressions that just catch in my chest. Such a sad sad song that feels like home to me. A punch to the gut kind of song, brutally gentle. I love emotionally confessional songs, intimate and hands held open, bare and vulnerable, a life explored and shared.

“Sweet Chariot”-Charlotte Martin

Ms Martin is my most recent musical true love. While I’ve been listening to Ms Hirsch for about 7 or 8 years, I just started listening to C.M. about a month or two ago. This song, again, is quite a simple chord progression, all piano and voice, uninterrupted, and close. Songs like this keep me sane, keep me feeling as though I am a human being. That emotions exists and flow through us, and that sadness and working through deep grief is such a part of life. The production is immaculate, sounds like being in a small room with a large wall window looking out onto a field or a forest, with a piano against one wall, with this song being played. Another very intimate sounding song. Present and alive, not just a recording. Living music.

“What we want”-Brittain Ashford

This one is just. This one is my heart. Short and sweet and sorrowful. Such a small song, “ and how were we to know we’d spend the rest of our lives trying to forget what made us who we are”, and such description, heartfelt cleverness. A love song that is an offering, again, another song that feels like palms stretched widely out, heart in hands, still beating vividly. “ I found you washing windows on some 32nd floor and I was pushing World Books door to door, and haven’t you ever wanted to know everything, and that’s exactly what it is I am offering you”-she writes such a story in three tiny verses, as though they are the most important musings ever. And this strong as warm voice over tinny, thin, and inviting instruments. So homemade and lovely. I can’t get over this song.

“Sea of Possibility”-Noe Venable

Dreams of the end, and new beginnings. “ With you I want to taste this freedom, with you remember life’s divinity, without you this love I take with me into the sea of possibility".Awake at night, the moon shining in. She makes clichéd poetic images completely new again with whistling and piano and marimba or something, and sort of beat boxing, into a sweet and slightly despondent but not too despairful and through to hopeful again. This song is the sea.

“Kimberly”-Patti Smith

An outside song, environment, storms and shatterings, kind of a companion piece to the imagery in the Noe Venable song. “the sea rushes up my knees like blame and I feel like just some misplaced Joan of Arc” is quite possibly one of my favorite lyrics ever. I’ve been listening to this song for about ten years, and I continuously forget what it is, that in the melodic and instrumental repetition are these stunning words, still so alive, more than thirty years after being recorded. Instants captured in art, and returned to life through the act of listening. A handing off of history, of experience, into a new form, someone else’s imaginative experience. Art is such an extraordinary and strange thing. Familiar and yet completely distant and unknown.

“Summer in the City”-Regina Spektor

It’s the first line, “Summer in the city means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage” that draws me in smiling, and the witticisms continue, but it’s also such a sad, sad song, and these two things working so brazenly with and against each other just creates magic. Quiet plinky piano and pauses, then full chords and her voice. Passionate and detached at once, little story and noticings bunched…”and it’s summer in the city and you’re long gone from this city, and I start to miss you baby sometimes”, the choir or something comes in. A perfect ending song to a perfect album, “Begin to Hope”. It kind of makes me want to puke it’s such an amazing song.

“Got a Suitcase Got Regrets”-Tom Mcrae

It’s the chorus. When the piano comes in, heavy and quiet. The whole arrangement to this song is stunning, different sounds meandering in and out, repeating, then disappearing. “But all I know is, I’m not ready yet, for the light to dim, got a suitcase, got regrets, but I’m hopeful yet, and I’ll raise this glass of wine and I’ll say your name”, piano, cello, not particularly the best lyrics ever, but they get to me. I get them. In fact, this isn’t a great song in any way, but sometimes, those are the best ones. Yeah, it’s the chorus. “So wake up pretty girl, see the hope in small things, disappointment can wear you thin…”.

“Recessional”-Vienna Teng

“It’s so beautiful here, she says. This moment now, this moment now…” starts the most heartstopping song. Literally, Vienna Teng is all about the spaces between notes, and the sweetness that lingers in and after each small moment of sound. Lyrically, I can’t even begin, so many images following each other, the separation of words echoing the music. Definitely a late at night, alone and longing song. She’s not afraid to play with single notes, not afraid to let suspension take over, then falling into water piano flows. Reflective and bittersweet. It’s almost a poetic novel. “who are you taking coffee no sugar, who are you echoing street signs, who are you the stranger in the shell of a lover, dark curtains drawn by the passage of time”. Lost and found.


“Another Song About the Darkness”-Lauren Hoffman

Another comfortable, recognizable home song. “And you’re almost dead, you’re almost dead…and I wish I could hang out up in the sky and be the light to shine you home, so I write another song about the darkness and how you’re not alone”. Nothing special electronics and synths, almost trip-hoppy but saved from that in simplicity. This is just a me song, something that I recognize myself in way too much, from both points of view in the song. It’s a warm blanket song. Like the green blanket at my apartment.

“Redeemed”-Charlotte Martin

“Every tree has got her root, every girl forbidden fruit and got her demons…one to three the flashback to get me on the one two four the threat of the memory. Where is the end for me to reach, where is the moral I’ll ever teach myself, in all the black in all the grief, I am redeemed”. I can’t really say anything about this song. It just perfectly encapsulates where I am, what I feel like most of the time, how I get through the day. Redeemed is such a big word, such a loaded word, and she somehow manages to bring it down to a bone deep level that makes sense. This song inhabits my days and mind. The drums and piano that come right after the chorus, and the piano all through the second verse. In and out of restraint and passion near the end, so amazing.

“Various Stages”-Great Lake Swimmers

“ I have seen you in various stages of dress. I have seen you through various states of madness”, all sung in a strong yet tremulous voice, with the most beautiful soft banjo playing. It’s a forest song, a field song all about outside, yet so close to the inside. My bones feel both heavier and lighter with this waltz. So beautiful, and quiet, and bold, gentle and reckless. I’ve been listening to so many pianos lately, and this was the song that brought stringed instruments back to me, balancing.

“Diagram of Love”-Terami Hirsch

My day doesn’t feel complete until I’ve listened to this song. Heartbeats and pianos. “This is not our failure. They speak in wordless tongues. Their hearts explore each void, looking for a diagram of love. This is not our failure, this is our compromise. The disintegration of hearts uncared for…”. This song is an encapsulation of all of Terami Hirsch’s music, how electronic music can sound organic and whole, mixing with a piano and voice. “There is no perfect formation, there has never been enough. There are only passing pleasures that we beautify to make a diagram of love”. I love the repetition an d reinvention, word like “formation” and “diagram”, making sciencely terms organic and down to earth, about the everyday.


“Human Remains”- Tom Mcrae

I lost my first copy of the album this is off of, “Just Like Blood”. I still have the case, just no cd. So I bought it again a few days ago, because I absolutely had to hear it. It was the only thing I wanted to listen to. “Our history is just in our blood, and history like love, is never enough”. The arrangement just manages to be complex yet intensely simple simultaneously. Much like his lyrics. “This is not enough for me, this is not enough for any of us to be.”.

“Streetlight”-Tom Mcrae

I may as well list the entire “Just Like blood" album.I haven’t really listened to Tom Mcrae in about two or three years, but his debut album is one of the most emotionally stunning works I’ve ever heard. It’s up there with Tori Amos’s “Boys for Pele”. Yet it’s also one of the most intimate singer-songwritery albums, which is what I love. The ability for an musician to make intense music and still have it sound and feel like you’re reading your favorite novel, or listening to someone across the table tell an impossibly philosophical and beautiful story. That’s how all of these songs tie together. They all have that feeling, that they are with you, not beyond and out of reach.